Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition Review (8GB GDDR5X)

Zotac being one of Nvidia’s main board partners, have always produced great graphic cards that come pre-overclocked. This means that their cards run faster than most, resulting in excellent performance when compared against their competitors. In order to do this successfully, you need a powerful cooling system, and Zotac has got the answer with their Ice-Storm cooling system and EKO fans.

Right now, Nvidia has won the battle of 2016 (against AMD/Radeon) for producing the world’s fastest GPUs. This is all thanks to a super-fast, but very efficient GPU utilizing the 16nm FinFET process and Pascal architecture. Furthermore, with Zotac’s pre-overclocked graphic cards, the AMP Extreme is a very powerful performer indeed. Not even the Founder’s Edition can touch it. It’s definitely the fastest GTX 1080 yet!

During my benchmarks, I got good scores for 3DMark 11, 3DMark Firestrike and Monster Hunter Online, which is DX11 based. For DX12 benchmark I used 3DMark Time Spy and DOOM. Both produced great scores. Remember, I ran this card at default settings (which is already pre-overlocked at 1771MHz. Standard clock rate is 1607MHz), I’ve yet to overclocked it with the Firestorm software, which should take me past 2000MHz!

Update: We’re updated our test rig, which now consists of an ASRock X99 motherboard, along with an Intel Core i7-6800K Broadwell processor and 32GB of ADATA DDR4-2400 ram in quad channel mode.

It will be interesting to see how this card will perform against other GTX 1080’s on the market. And I would love to compare its performance in SLI mode vs the recently announced Nvidia TITAN X, which they claim to be THE world’s fastest graphics card and with a nice catchphrase too!… “Irresponsible Amount of Performance”… Hahaha!

Pricewise, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition will cost you a staggering USD $870-899, which is pretty high right now. But you do get a better cooler and it comes pre-overclocked. Is it worth the price? … I’ll let you decide. In comparison, the Founder’s Edition costs a mere USD $699. Buy now at Amazon – http://goo.gl/dbzprq

Pros:

Great performance

VR-Ready

Pre-overclocked at 1771MHz

Can be overclocked further to 1911MHz or higher

FireStorm application for tuning and overclocking

2560 CUDA cores

8GB of GDDR5X video memory

256-bit memory bus

Spectra lighting system

EKO fans and Ice-Storm cooling

Exoarmor backplate

Cons:

Price

Weight

Final Words:

To put it simply, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition is currently the world’s fastest GTX 1080. The pre-overclocked GPU really makes all the difference, producing the best score I’ve seen to date in all of our benchmarks. You also get a very powerful cooler with 6 heatpipes , along with some very quiet EKO fans. If you’re hardcore gamer with a fat wallet, go get yourself one of these … you won’t be disappointed. For the rest of us, we can only dream 😉